Embodiments disclosed herein are related to the art of color consistency management in multi-engine systems. Illustrative embodiments will be described in terms of document production in imaging systems associated with a plurality of printing or marking engines. However, methods and systems disclosed herein are applicable to other environments. For example, methods and systems disclosed herein may be applied to environments that include plurality of display engines or other imaging devices. As such, references to documents, pages, document objects, pages or portions should be interpreted as references to similar portions of any image or group of images that might be displayed, printed or otherwise rendered viewable.
As used herein, gamut refers to a set or range of colors. Color producing engines, such as printing or marking engines and display devices, are associated with individual device gamuts or a set or range of colors each individual device can produce. While it may be a goal of an engine manufacturer that each unit of a particular model of color producing engine has the same gamut as every other unit of that engine model, manufacturing tolerances, age, wear, environment factors, such as temperature and humidity, as well as other factors, can cause gamuts to vary from unit to unit or individual engine to individual engine. Gamut variation between engines of different models or technologies can be even greater. Therefore, color consistency can be a challenge in systems that include a plurality of engines.
One approach to improving color consistency in multi-engine systems is based on tighter manufacturing tolerances and/or with more sophisticated controls. For example, United States Patent Application Publication No. US 2005/0071104 A1 by Viturro, et al., published Mar. 31, 2005, entitled METHOD FOR CALIBRATING A MARKING SYSTEM TO MAINTAIN COLOR OUTPUT CONSISTENCY ACROSS MULTIPLE PRINTERS, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, discloses a method for maintaining consistent color output across printers even when associated in-line sensors have differences in accuracy due to various technical and environmental factors.
Another approach to maintaining color consistency is to determine an intersection gamut or a gamut common to all the engines associated with the system or with the production of a document and to transform image data of an entire document or job to include only colors that are within the gamuts of, or are achievable by, all of the associated engines. For instance, United States Patent Application Publication No. US 2005/0036159 A1 by Sharma, et al., published Feb. 17, 2005, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR OBTAINING COLOR CONSISTENCY FOR A COLOR PRINT JOB ACROSS MULTIPLE OUTPUT DEVICES, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, discloses a method which involves identifying a group of devices to which a job is intended to be rendered, obtaining color characteristics from devices in the identified group and mapping colors in the original job to the output devices common gamut, i.e., intersection of the gamuts of the individual printers.
However, improved controls can be expensive to design and implement and may not always be available. The intersection gamut of a plurality of engines is likely to be smaller or include fewer colors than the individual gamut of any particular engine in the plurality. Therefore, images prepared for rendering with an intersection gamut may be less vibrant or less accurate than they would be if prepared for rendering with the gamut of a selected individual engine. In some cases, consistency can be less important or desirable than color accuracy or vibrance. Therefore, there has been a desire for systems and methods that prepare documents or images for rendering or production through the intelligent selection of target gamuts.